humor, madder nonsense, or more tender sympathy! In fact, these excellent Letters and Elia give almost the whole man- too changeful, too uncapturable, to be put in a phrase, and on that account always freshly interesting. Scarcely any figure in the whole range of literature can be known so intimately as a human being, aside from his literary fame. He clung tenaciously to life and living men and women. "I am in love with this green earth," he says in "New Year's Eve.” “ . . . I would set up my tabernacle here. . . . A new state of being staggers me." And in 1827 he wrote to Robinson, after the death of an old friend, Randal Norris, "I have none to call me Charley now."

In March, 1822, Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, in referring to the East India House, "Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke." Three years later, he was retired on a pension of £441 a year. "I walk about, not to and from," he says quaintly in "The Superannuated Man,” an essay published in May, 1725; “. . . I grow into gentility perceptibly. . . . I have worked task-work, and have the rest of the day to myself." But he had been too long in the service ever to get used to so much leisure. He called Enfield "this vale of deliberate senectitude," and half wished for the old bondage. The household was brightened, however, by the adoption, in 1823, of a little girl named Emma Isola. Ten years later she married Moxon, the publisher. Lamb continued to write occasionally through these last years: some of his last Elia essays, Album Verses (1830), and Satan in Search of a Wife (1831). On December 22, 1834, he stumbled and fell, was not strong enough to recover from the blow, and "sank

into death," says Talfourd, "as placidly as into sleep," on December 27, 1834, in his sixtieth year.

Those who would enjoy to the full Lamb's numerous clever sayings and the best anecdotes about him should follow him through the excellent Life by Mr. E. V. Lucas. Here there is space for only a few. At Haydon's "immortal dinner," in 1816, when Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb talked so rarely, there was also present a pompous comptroller of stamps, who insisted on an intimacy with Wordsworth, and who asked, among other strange questions, "Don't you think Newton a great genius?" "I could not stand it any longer," says Haydon. "Keats put his head into my books. Wordsworth seemed asking himself, Who is this?' Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, 'Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?' He then turned his back on the poor man and at every question of the comptroller he chanted

...

'Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John
Went to bed with his breeches on.'

Keats and I hurried Lamb into the paintingroom, shut the door and gave way to inextinguishable laughter. All the while we could hear Lamb struggling in the painting-room and calling at intervals, Who is that fellow? Allow me to see his organs once more.""

There is a story that one evening Lamb, who had urged Wordsworth to expunge the lines in Peter Bell"Is it a party in a parlor

All silent and all damned?"—

as he passed a window through which were visible a company sitting in silent plush solemnity, shook the

railings and called out: "A party in a parlor, all silent and all damned!"

Another time Coleridge said, "Charles, I think you have heard me preach?" "I n-n-never heard you do anything else," replied Lamb.

But Lamb's jokes, however excellent, are not, it must be remembered, the greater part of him. In his "uncomplaining endurance," says Barry Cornwall, "and in his steady adherence to a great principle of conduct, his life was heroic." "There was no fuss or cant about him," is one of Hazlitt's many tributes; "nor were his sweets or sours ever diluted with one particle of affectation." The world is coming to see that in doing no more than enjoy Lamb's puns and happy phrases it has done him scant justice; that his life was made sad by a tragic duty and sublime by his quiet, manly bearing of his burden.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

AFTER Coleridge and Lamb one may well be prepared for extremes of genius; but one finds, in following Thomas De Quincey, that one has not half guessed the vagaries which human nature can take. De Quincey, in fact, is the most various, the most elusive in character of all the great Romanticists; and it is only by coming to him with no preconceptions that one can possibly reconcile his intellectual power with his tendency to dreams, his strong will with his enslavement to an injurious habit, his shyness and solitude with his love of human society, and his minutely logical mind with his disorderly methods of life. As he himself said, "not to sympathize is not to understand."

On account of the sensational title of one of his books De Quincey has been too exclusively associated with opium-eating. With his use of the drug this narrative must deal later; here, however, it is important to notice that he was not a dreamer because he took opium, but, as Mr. Page, his chief biographer, has pointed out, he rather took opium the more readily because he was a dreamer, because he had what he himself called a " constitutional determination to reverie." Yet to call him merely an inspired dreamer is superficial and inadequate. He was, Coleridge not excepted, the most magnificent dreamer of a body of men given to great visions; but he was much more. He called himself " an intellectual creature," in both pursuits and pleasures, from his school-days; and this characteristic, intellectual force,

can never rightly be dissociated from any glimpse of him, whether in his dreams, in his humor, in his philosophy, or in the mere events of his life. Such an intellect, moreover, which could be the informing power of such emotional dreams, must have been intensely sympathetic; and one is not surprised, therefore, to learn of his hatred of pedantry, his love of human beings, and, when his physical frailty is recognized, the almost immeasurable pain which he suffered.

In spite of De Quincey's remark concerning biography, that "one is so certain of the man's being born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it," the dates of his own birth and death are especially full of meaning; for he was born early enough to be a contemporary and friend of the great Romanticists, and yet lived, not in aged repose, but in active literary work, to be the contemporary and friend of Victorian writers; he was born before the French Revolution and he outlived the Crimean War; Carlyle, Ruskin, Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson were all famous years before his death. The exact date of his birth, which took place in Manchester, was August 15, 1785. He was the fifth child of Thomas Quincey, a merchant, and a Miss Penson. The family name had been English since the Conquest and was entitled to the prefix De, which the son adopted, writing it, however, with a small d.

Soon after the boy's birth the family lived at “The Farm," near Manchester, and in 1791 moved to Greenhay. Thus a great part of his childhood was spent in the country, his fondness for which was almost instinctive and lasted throughout his life. The earliest things he remembered were: "first, a remarkable dream of terrific